Gothic Heralds of the Renaissance Dawn ; How Florentine Art of the 1400s Gave Rise to Flowerings of a New Age

Morris, Roderick Conway, International Herald Tribune

The rich and varied ground of late 14th and early 15th century
art in Florence gave rise to the first flowerings of the
Renaissance.

Gentile da Fabriano's "Adoration of the Magi" of 1423 is one of
the supreme masterpieces of any era and widely recognized as the
apex of late Gothic painting. But it marked a beginning as well as
an end.

Not only did it exert a powerful influence over Gentile's
contemporaries and successors, from Masolino, Fra Angelico and
Uccello to Jacopo Bellini and Domenico Veneziano, but it also was
returned to for inspiration by artists decades later, including
Leonardo and Michelangelo.

More than a century and a half later a Florentine guidebook
declared that the "Adoration" was revered "as an object of antiquity
and because it comes from the painter who first gave birth to the
beautiful style that flourishes today."

This "Gothic" work was commissioned by Palla Strozzi, one of the
richest men in Florence, an advanced advocate of humanism and an
early scholar of Greek. The "Adoration" is lavishly adorned and
embossed with gold in the traditional Gothic fashion, but also
achieves a new naturalness in its lighting and in the three-
dimensionality of its figures. In one of the predella panels is a
painting of the first true nocturnal scene with realistic shadows,
and in another is a depiction of the dawn breaking over the
countryside, the rising sun's rays illuminating foothills and a hill-
top town while the valley beyond the mountains remains in half-
light.

The late 14th and early 15th centuries were a period of
transition in which no single style dominated in Florentine art and,
as the two paintings that mark the beginning and the end of a
stimulating exhibition -- Gentile da Fabriano's "Adoration" and
Paolo Uccello's newly restored "Battle of San Romano" -- amply
demonstrate, what was later to be viewed as old-fashioned happily co-
existed with more radical trends. Indeed, it was this rich and
varied ground that gave rise to the first flowerings of Renaissance
art.

For practical reasons, "The Gleam of Gold: The International
Gothic Style in Florence 1375-1440," curated by the Uffizi's
director, Antonio Natali, starts in Rooms 5 to 7 of the gallery's
permanent collection. They are devoted to the International Gothic
and Early Renaissance, and contain two monumental altarpieces --
Gentile's "Adoration" and Lorenzo Monaco's "Coronation of the
Virgin" (his only signed and dated work) -- as well as smaller
pieces by Masolino, Masaccio, Fra Angelico, Uccello, Domenico
Veneziano and others.

After these first rooms, visitors wishing to follow the logic of
the special exhibition should fast-forward along the main east and
west corridors of the gallery, by-passing the next 350 years of art,
down to the continuation of the show in the new Temporary Exhibition
Rooms.

The first of these rooms -- "14th-century Roots," "Construction
Sites" and "Humanist Preludes" -- reveal a world in which sculpture
in particular was leading the way in the rediscovery of ancient art.
A curious pair of marbles by Giovanni d'Ambrogio, from the 1390s, of
the Virgin and the Angel of the Annunciation, with bodies in the
medieval style but heads like those of classical statues, even today
leave us wondering which is Mary and which the divine messenger, the
only indicator being the open book in the Virgin's left hand.

A large central room -- "The Several Paths of Humanism" -- brings
together masterpieces from the first three decades of the 15th
century, by Ghiberti, Fra Angelico, Donatello, Masolino, Lorenzo
Monaco and Uccello, well illustrating in their strikingly different
modes that the development of Florentine art was far from linear.

The most consistently Gothic of these artists was Lorenzo Monaco,
possibly born in Siena but who ran a workshop outside the walls of
his Florentine monastery. He was the least touched of them by
mathematical perspective and other innovations, but this did not
prevent him pushing the tradition out of which he came to new
limits. …

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